Delta Air Lines and SAS Announce Codeshare Agreement

There’s a lot happening with Scandinavian Airlines (commonly known as SAS). The latest move is a codeshare agreement between Delta and SAS, which will open up each airline’s route network to passengers originating on flights with the airline.

Let’s take a look at what the latest news means for travelers.

New Delta and SAS Codeshare Agreement

Effective September 25, 2024, Delta Air Lines and SAS will begin a new codeshare agreement, announced this morning. There’s been a flurry of news with SAS this month, so let’s quickly recap that to figure out how we got to the new codeshare with Delta and why this matters.

SAS filed for bankruptcy in 2022, and its exit came after a major investment from Air France-KLM. At that point, the carrier’s future became much clearer, as SAS left Star Alliance (of which it was a founding member in 1997) and joined rival alliance SkyTeam on September 1, 2024.

Since then, SAS has begun publishing earning rates for flights on its new partners. In return, SkyTeam partners are publishing award charts covering redemption flights on SAS.

SAS also announced new flight routes to the U.S. for the summer of 2025. Interestingly, some of those align with Delta’s U.S. hubs. However, Delta doesn’t currently offer service on its own metal to the airline’s primary hubs across Scandinavia in Copenhagen (CPH), Oslo (OSL), and Stockholm (ARN).

Until a couple of days from now, U.S. travelers looking for onward flights within Europe had fewer options — especially in northern Europe. The new codeshare agreement between Delta and SAS, however, will let travelers start on Delta flights and then connect onward to an SAS flight, providing access to additional destinations. The same holds true in reverse.

This codeshare agreement provides Delta flyers access to an additional 50 destinations in Europe. SAS flyers, meanwhile, get access to an additional 150 destinations in the U.S.

While an interline agreement would allow passengers to connect from Delta flights to SAS flights on 1 ticket, a codeshare agreement does more. Travelers will be able to earn SkyMiles on the SAS portion of the journey, for example, and the airlines have indicated reciprocal elite benefits are coming soon. We’ll start seeing Delta flight numbers and marketing on SAS flights, plus SAS marketing Delta flights on its own website.

Final Thoughts

SAS has been busy this month. It changed alliances, updated partnership agreements, made its flights available for redemption bookings on new partners, and now it’s signed a codeshare agreement with Delta.

This likely isn’t the end of the news cycle with SAS this year — or possibly even this month. The next step may very well be joining the SkyTeam transatlantic joint venture, but only time will tell if that actually happens.